The present invention is related generally to transmission scheduling, and in particular, to scheduling transmission in multi-cell multi-carrier wireless systems.
Scheduling problems in cellular networks arise from excessive loading in the networks, delaying transmissions. Proportional fairness scheduling algorithms have been used. At every slot, the user is served with the largest ratio of the instantaneous service rate to its average service rate.
In Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based multi-carrier systems, scheduling improvements are needed to avoid multi-path interference and to achieve higher spectral efficiency. However, conventional solutions only address scheduling in single-cell networks and do not consider the effect of finite queue size of each user.
Additionally, in conventional scheduling, it was believed that scheduling across multiple cells was not practical due to the large latency and large overhead between base stations and the radio network controller. For this reason, scheduling in multi-cell multi-carrier wireless systems was ignored.
Therefore, there remains a need to improve throughput in multi-cell multi-carrier wireless networks.